Five Best Ways to Get Traffic Now

Hello all.

I have been in the game for a while, longer than some, shorter than others. Regardless, no matter how experienced you are, when you have a website, you have to get traffic. And here are 5 of the best ways to get it now, in order of least to greatest.

1. Write articles about your site and its content and submit it to the many article directories that exist across the internet. This may sound pointless to a newbie, I know it did for me, but its one of the best free ways to get traffic. It is easy to get 100+ views just from one article. Keep in mind the best performing articles are between 400 and 600 words, so don’t overdo it or your traffic may suffer. You submit articles to the popular directories for traffic, but you submit them to smaller directories for back-links (I suggest an auto-submitter of some kind for the small directories, it isn’t worth it by hand, and it wont bring you an ounce of traffic directly). Now if your going to submit by hand, I suggest the 3 most popular (by traffic ratings) directories, they are:

EzineArticles.com (8’000’000 hits this month)
Buzzle.com (1’200’000 hits this month)
GoArticles.com (400’000 hits this month)

Ezine-Articles brings the most traffic but has the strictest submission requirements. GoArticles brings decent traffic and has little to no submission requirements. And of course Buzzle is mid-road. And to submit them to the smaller directories, I submit using ArticleSender.com, with their free service it will blast your article to over 11’000 directories. Keyword research is just as important in getting traffic to your articles as it is for getting traffic to your site, remember that if you want your articles to perform their best, but keyword research is another topic entirely.

2. Submit your site to search engines if you haven’t already. Google doesn’t just magically know your site exists, you have to manually submit it or use a program to auto-submit it. If you have a blog, pingomatic.com will submit it to many directories and they will help to build traffic and back-links in the long run. It can take over a month for Google to include your site anywhere in their listing, because they don’t re-index their search results often. This is a big one, but it can take time. To submit your URL to Google visit Google.com/AddURL.

3. Submit videos to youtube and metacafe about your site or niche. Even the least popular videos on youtube accumulate 1000 views eventually, and if you do it right you can get much more than that. It need not be anything complicated, you just need to get straight to the point, no jerking around, and give them what they wanted when they clicked your video in the first place. Youtube has had 250’000’000 views this month alone. Metacafe has had 15’000’000 and there is less competition.

4. Find questions in Yahoo Answers that somehow pertain to your site or niche. Answer them with a link to your site. Yahoo Answers ranks very highly in Google so this is a good way to get both traffic and back-links. A questions indicates that there is demand there for what you are offering.

5. Find blogs that appear highly in google search, and ones that are related to your site, and leave comments on them with a link to your site. This works better than you would think and builds precious back-links.

Those are the main five, but you should develop the habit of trying to mention your site, even in a passive way, everywhere you trail on the internet. Whether it be in the signature of a forum you visit often, Myspace, Facebook, Craigslist, comments that you leave on youtube, and anywhere else you can think of. It takes little effort to do these smaller steps but all together they are worthwhile and can form a considerable chunk of your traffic, but focus on the big methods first.

There are many other ways to get traffic, but if you master these 5 you will be doing well. Also you should look into keyword research, I will be writing an article for that soon enough. In the long run don’t try to do everything on your own, one of the best methods of getting traffic that I have found is working in a team with someone else who has the same goal that you do, it will increase your progress exponentially as long as you keep up with each other. These are only free ways to get traffic, PPC (Pay-per-Click) would be a likely next step once you have enough income to cover it. But that is another topic altogether.